256
n r>
"Children, 'living is being happy!'"
257
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
The Angels
children keep dancing, flirtatiously throwing their bellies forward, and she feels the nausea that emanates from weightless things. That hollowness in her stomach is exactly that unbearable absence of weight. And just as an extreme can at any moment turn into its opposite, so lightness brought to its maximum becomes the terrifying weight of lightness, and Tamina knows she cannot bear it for another moment. She turns around and starts to run.
She takes the plane-tree lane down to the water.
Now she is at its edge. She looks around. There is no boat.
As she did on the first day, she runs along the entire shore of the island, looking for the boat. She does not see it. Finally she comes back to the spot where the lane meets the beach. The children are excitedly running down it.
She stops.
The children notice her and rush toward her, shouting.
26
The island resounds with the shouting of a song and the din of electric guitars. A tape recorder has been set down on the play area in front of the dormitory. Standing over it is a boy who looks to Tamina like the boatman with whom she long ago came to the island. She is on the alert. If he is indeed the boatman, the boat must be here. She knows that she must not let this opportunity go by. Her heart is pounding, and all she can think of from now on is how to escape.
The boy is staring down at the tape recorder and wiggling his hips. Children come running to the play area to join him: flinging now one arm, now the other, forward, they throw their heads back and wave their hands, pointing their index fingers as if threatening someone, and shout along with the song coming from the tape recorder.
Tamina is hiding behind the thick trunk of a plane tree, unwilling to let them see her but unable to take her eyes off them. They are behaving with the provocative flirtatiousness of adults, thrusting their hips back and forth as if imitating coition. The obscenity of the motions superimposed on the children's bodies does away with the opposition between obscenity and innocence, purity and vileness. Sensuality becomes absurd, innocence becomes absurd, vocabulary decomposes, and Tamina feels nausea: as if her stomach were hollow.
The idiocy of the guitars keeps resounding, and the
258
27
She dived into the water.
It was not because she was afraid. She had been thinking about it for a long time. After all, the crossing to the island by boat had not taken very long. Although the opposite shore was not visible, she
259
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
would not need superhuman strength to swim to it!
Shouting, the children rushed to the spot where she had dived in, and some stones hit the water around her. But she swam fast and was soon beyond the range of their feeble arms.
Swimming, she felt well for the first time in a very long time. She could feel her body, feel her old strength. She had always been an excellent swimmer and was enjoying her every stroke. The water was cold, but she delighted in its chilliness, which seemed to be washing her skin of all the children's filth, of their saliva and their stares.
She swam for a long time, and the sun began to sink slowly into the water.
Then the darkness deepened, and soon it was pitch black, with no moon or stars, and Tamina did her best to keep heading in the same direction.
The Angels
Then she must have had some idea about the world she wanted to live in!
She had none. All she had left was a tremendous craving for life, and her body. Nothing but these two things, nothing more. She wanted to tear them away from the island and save them. Her body and that craving for life.
29
Day was breaking. She squinted to catch sight of the shore ahead.
But there was nothing in front of her, nothing but water. She turned and looked back. Not very far, barely one hundred meters away, was the shore of the green island.
What? Had she been swimming in place all night? Distress overcame her, and from the moment she lost hope her limbs were weak and the water was unbearably icy. She closed her eyes and tried to continue swimming. She no longer counted on reaching the other side, all she could think of now was her death, and she wanted to die somewhere midwater, far from all contact, alone with nothing but the fish. Her eyes closed, and she dozed off for an instant, getting water in her lungs, and in the midst of coughing and choking she suddenly heard children's voices.
261
28
Just where was she trying to go back to? Prague?
She had even forgotten it existed.
To the small town in the west of Europe?
No. She simply wanted to go away.
Does that mean she wished to die?
No, no, not at all. On the contrary, she had a terrific desire to live.
260
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
Treading water, she coughed and looked around. Just a few strokes away was a boat loaded with children. They were shouting. When they noticed she had seen them, they fell silent. They came nearer, their eyes fixed on her. She saw how agitated they were.
She was afraid they would try to save her and make her play with them again. She felt exhaustion and a numbness in her limbs.
The boat was very near, and five children's faces were eagerly inclined over her.
Tamina shook her head desperately, as if to say, Let me die, don't save me.
But she had no reason to be afraid. The children were making no move, no one was offering an oar or a hand, no one was trying to save her. They were just staring at her, wide-eyed and eager, watching her. One of the boys used his oar as a rudder to keep the boat close by.
Water again got into her lungs, and she coughed and thrashed her arms, feeling she could no longer stay afloat. Her legs were getting heavier and heavier. They were dragging her down like weights.
Her head went under. With violent motions, she managed to raise it several times; each time, she saw the boat and the children's eyes watching her.
Then she vanished beneath the surface.
PART SEVEN
The Border
(Quotations on page 257 are from Annie Leclerc, Parole defemme, 1976.)
262
1
What he always found most interesting about a woman while making love was her face. The movements of the two bodies seemed to be unwinding a large reel of film, projecting on the woman's face, as on a television screen, a captivating movie filled with turmoil, expectations, explosions, pain, cries, emotion, and evil. But Edwige's face remained a blank screen, and Jan would stare at it, tormented by questions he could find no answers to: Was she bored with him? Was she tired? Was she making love reluctantly? Was she used to better lovers? Or was she, behind that immobile face, hiding sensations he had no inkling of?
Of course he could have asked her. But something uncommon had happened to them. Although they had always been talkative and open with each other, they would both lose the power of speech once their naked bodies embraced each other.
He had never quite known how to understand that silence. Maybe it was because, lovemaking aside, Ed-wige was always more enterprising than he. Even though she was younger, she had already uttered at least three times as many words and dispensed ten times as much instruction and advice. She was like a
265
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
The Border
wise and tender mother taking him by the hand and guiding him through life.
He often imagined breathing obscene words into her ear while making love. But even in these reveries the venture ended in failure. He was certain that a tranquil smile of reproach and indulgent fondness would dawn on her face, the smile of a mother seeing her little boy filch a forbidden cookie from the cupboard.
/> Or he imagined whispering the greatest banality of all: "Do you like that?" With other women, this simple query always sounded depraved. By giving an act of love the respectable name "that," he would immediately awaken the desire for other words, words that would reflect physical love as in a hall of mirrors. But he seemed to know Edwige's response in advance: Of course I like that, she would tell him patiently. Do you think I would willingly do something I don't like? Be a bit logical, Jan!
And so he neither said obscene words nor asked her whether she liked that. He remained silent while their bodies moved long and vigorously, unwinding a reel with no film.
He often reflected that he was the one to blame for their nights in silence. He had contrived a caricature of Edwige as lover that now stood as a barrier between them, preventing him from reaching the real Edwige, her senses and her shrouded obsceneness. Anyway, after each of their nights in silence, he resolved not to make love to her the next time. He loved her as an intelligent, faithful, irreplaceable friend, not as a mistress. But it was impossible to separate mistress from friend. Each
266
time he came to see her, they would talk about things late into the night, Edwige would drink, develop theories, give instruction, and finally, when Jan was dead tired, she would suddenly fall silent and a tranquil, blissful smile would appear on her face. Then, as if submitting to an irresistible suggestion, Jan would touch her breast, and she would stand up and start to undress. Why does she want to make love with me? he often wondered, but could find no answer. All he knew was that their silent coitions were inescapable, just as it is inescapable that a citizen will stand at attention when he hears the national anthem, though surely neither he nor his country derives any pleasure from it.
2
During the last two hundred years the blackbird has abandoned the woods to become a city bird. First in Great Britain at the end of the eighteenth century, then several decades later in Paris and the Ruhr Valley. Throughout the nineteenth century it conquered the cities of Europe one after the other. It settled in Vienna and Prague around 1900, then spread eastward to Budapest, Belgrade, Istanbul.
From the planet's viewpoint, the blackbird's invasion of the human world is certainly more important
267
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
than the Spanish invasion of South America or the return to Palestine of the Jews. A shift in the relationships among the various kinds of creation (fish, birds, humans, plants) is a shift of a higher order than changes in relations among various groups of the same kind. Whether Celts or Slavs inhabit Bohemia, whether Romanians or Russians conquer Bessarabia, is more or less the same to the earth. But when the blackbird betrayed nature to follow humans into their artificial, unnatural world, something changed in the organic structure of the planet.
And yet no one dares to interpret the last two centuries as the history of the invasion of man's cities by the blackbird. All of us are prisoners of a rigid conception of what is important and what is not, and so we fasten our anxious gaze on the important, while from a hiding place behind our backs the unimportant wages its guerrilla war, which will end in surreptitiously changing the world and pouncing on us by surprise.
If someone were to write Jan's biography, he might sum up the period I am talking about by saying something like this: His affair with Edwige marked a new stage in the life of the forty-five-year-old Jan. Renouncing at last his desultory and empty way of life, he decided to leave the town in the west of Europe and devote himself with renewed energy to important work in the United States, with which he then attained, etc., etc.
But how would Jan's imaginary biographer explain to me why Jan's favorite book just then was that novel of antiquity Daphnis and Chloe? The love of two
268
The Border
young people, nearly children still, who know nothing about physical love. The bleating of a ram mingles with the sound of the sea, and a sheep grazes in the shade of an olive tree. The two young people lie naked side by side, filled with an immense, vague desire. They embrace, press against each other, are closely entwined. They stay this way for a long, long time, not knowing what more to do. They think that this embrace is the beginning and end of love's pleasures. They are aroused, their hearts are pounding, but they do not know what it is to make love. Yes, it is this passage that fascinates Jan.
3
Hanna the actress sat with her legs crossed under her like the Buddha statues for sale in all the world's antique shops. She talked nonstop as she intently watched her thumb slowly going round and round along the edge of the pedestal table next to the couch. It was not the mechanical gesture of a nervous person habitually tapping his foot or scratching his head. It was the conscious and deliberate, lithe and graceful gesture of tracing around herself a magic circle within which she could concentrate entirely on herself and the others could concentrate on her.
269
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
She followed the course of her thumb with delight, only occasionally looking up at Jan, who sat facing her. She was telling him she had just been through a nervous breakdown because her son, who lived with her former husband, had run away and been gone for several days. Her son's father was such a brute he telephoned her with the news half an hour before she went onstage. Hanna had come down with a temperature, headaches, and a head cold. "I had so much trouble with my nose I couldn't even blow it!" she said, fastening her big, beautiful eyes on Jan. "My nose was like a cauliflower!"
She had the smile of a woman who knows that on her, even a red nose is charming. She lived in exemplary harmony with herself. She loved her nose, and she also loved the audacity with which she called a cold a cold and a nose a cauliflower. The unconventional beauty of her red nose thus complemented her intellectual audacity, and the circular course of her thumb, mingling the two charms within its magic circumference, expressed the indivisible unity of her personality. "I was worried about the high fever. Do you know what my doctor said? 'I have only one piece of advice for you, Hanna: Don't take your temperature!'"
Hanna laughed loud and long at her doctor's joke, and then said: "Do you know who I met? Passer!"
Passer was an old friend of Jan's. When Jan saw him last, several months before, he was about to have an operation. Everyone knew he had cancer, everyone but Passer himself, who, filled with amazing vitality and
270
The Border
credulity, believed the doctors' lies. In any event, the operation was a very serious one, and when they were alone he said to Jan: "After that operation, you understand, I won't be a man anymore. My life as a man is over."
"I met him last week at the Clevises' country house," Hanna went on. "What a fantastic character! He's younger than any of us! I adore him!"
Jan should have been delighted to learn that his friend was adored by the beautiful actress, but it made no particular impression on him because everyone loved Passer. In recent years, his shares had risen sharply on the irrational stock exchange of social popularity. It had become almost a ritual, during desultory dinner-party conversations in town, to devote some admiring words to Passer.
"You know those beautiful woods around the Clevises' house? They're filled with mushrooms, and I adore hunting mushrooms! When I asked who wanted to go mushroom hunting with me, no one wanted to, only Passer, who said: "I'll come with you!' Imagine that, Passer, a sick man! I tell you, he's younger than any of us!"
She looked down at her thumb, which not for an instant stopped circling along the edge of the pedestal table, and said: "So I went picking mushrooms with Passer. It was wonderful! We got lost in the woods and then we found a cafe. A grimy little country cafe. The kind I adore. In places like that you drink cheap red wine like the regulars. Passer was magnificent. I adore him!"
271
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
The Border
4
At that time
the beaches in the west of Europe were covered in summer with women who wore no tops to their bathing suits, and the population was divided between partisans and adversaries of bare breasts. The Clevis family—father, mother, and fourteen-year-old daughter—sat in front of the television set, watching a debate in which representatives of every intellectual current of the day developed their arguments for and against tops. The psychoanalyst fervently defended bare breasts and spoke of the liberation from convention that has delivered us from the omnipotence of erotic fantasies. The Marxist, without giving a verdict on top-lessness (the Communist Party had both puritans and libertines among its members, and it was impolitic to take either side), cleverly diverted the debate to the more basic problem of the hypocritical morality of bourgeois society, which was doomed. The representative of Christian thinking felt obliged to defend the top, but he did it very timidly, because he too could not escape the omnipresent spirit of the time; he could find only one argument in the top's favor, the innocence of children, which everyone had the duty to respect and protect. He was taken to task by an energetic woman who declared that getting rid of the hypocritical taboo against nudity should begin in childhood and recommended that parents walk around the house naked.